About the Vice Chancellor

A strong advocate of deep and lasting educational change, Manuel Gómez has worked for more than thirty years to expand educational opportunity and promote innovative academic partnerships. His work on behalf of students began in the Oakland school district, where he pioneered workshops on multicultural curricula and teaching practices to enhance learning. Manuel was also an early advocate for including parents in the process of educational improvement and school change. This early emphasis on collaboration has carried over into his work at UC Irvine, where he started in 1972 as a counselor and then director of the Educational Opportunity Program. In the intervening years, Manuel has served as assistant and associate vice chancellor of enrollment services, and currently as vice chancellor of student affairs. During his tenure at UC Irvine, he also consulted for the U.S. Department of Education, worked as a program officer with the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, advised the California Postsecondary Education Commission, and he has also served as interim vice president for educational outreach for the UC Office of the President.

In each of his roles, Manuel has been focused on students, from improving the quality of student life at UC Irvine to promoting educational partnerships by establishing the UCI Center for Educational Partnerships. He has helped to develop a number of nationally recognized models for collaboration, including Project STEP: A Partnership for the Advancement of Learning. He serves as a project investigator for the NSF-supported BEST initiative that identifies the best projects aimed at improving student achievement in science and math. In 1999, he was invited to participate in a Vision 21 Educational Exchange Program with the People's Republic of China, which led to his role as co-founder of the "Silk Road to the Future" project, which is now a UC-wide initiative providing cultural exchange opportunities for UC students to travel in China. In 1998, the Ford Foundation in cooperation with the National Center for Educational Alliances in New York invited Manuel to South Africa. He delivered a talk entitled, "Partnership: Antidote to Apartheid."

Dr. Gómez is the administrative representative invited to be a member of the UC Academic Planning Council. He served as a group leader on the Strategic Review Panel on Outreach in 2002, and currently participates in the UC Admissions Study Group. He also serves on the board of the Merage Family Foundation, Children First. He has served as vice chair of the St. Joseph's Ballet Board in Santa Ana, Ca. He was a founding board member of the Health Foundation for Orange County and also served as chair of the United Way's Hispanic Development Council

Manuel received his Ph.D. in Higher Education Policy and Organization from USC. He has his Bachelor's degree in History from CSU, Hayward, and his Master's in Social Ecology from UC Irvine. He is co-author of the book, To Advance Learning: A Handbook on Developing K-12 Postsecondary Partnerships (1990), along with numerous articles on K-16 education, including an analysis on former UC President Atkinson's proposal on admissions tests in Rethinking the SAT: The Future of Standardized Testing in University Admissions (RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), and the preface to The Elusive Quest for Equality (Harvard University Press, 1998). Manuel is also a published poet.